The university yesterday tested a new live emergency alert platform along with the current Send Word Now system to assess the need for a new system. Both tests, officials said, were largely successful.
The purpose of the test was to compare the viability of the new Rave Mobile Safety and Send Word Now, which the university has used since November 2007, when the Tufts Emergency Alert System was first implemented.
Dawn Irish, the University Information Technology (UIT) director of communications and organizational effectiveness, noted that the test of the new system is not due to any failure on the part of Send Word Now.
She explained that the university wanted to see if any of the new platforms, such as Rave Mobile Safety, are improvements over the current system.
"There have been a lot of changes, updates and technological advancements since [we chose Send Word Now in 2007]," Irish said. "We thought it was a prudent time to evaluate our current system against another commercial product."
According to Irish, preliminary analysis has revealed both systems to be very effective.
For each test performed, both systems delivered messages to over 15,000 people, including nearly 10,000 SMS messages, 18,000 telephone messages and 20,000 e−mails.
Exact statistics are still unavailable concerning the performance of each system as the university is waiting to receive that information from the vendors. Irish noted, however, that neither of the two systems ran into noticeable issues.
Geoffrey Bartlett, technical services manager in the Department of Public Safety, added that besides the numerical data that Tufts will use to decide between the systems, a survey has also been instituted for phone users to report on the quality of voicemail messages left by the two platforms.
While both systems, as of right now, seem to have performed at equal levels, the debate over switching systems, according to Irish, is not over.
"There are a lot of factors that determine if we change a vendor," she said. "Obviously, contract is one, technical performance is another and pricing is another. Those are the pieces to the puzzle that we don't have the answer to yet."
Bartlett explained that while Tufts is considering multiple vendors other than Rave Mobile Safety, the Rave system was the only one that had already been sufficiently assessed to the point that a large−scale evaluation was necessary.
Another factor in the decision to test Rave was that the vendor offers the Rave Test Drive, a complimentary emergency test for schools to evaluate the system, according to Bartlett.
Bartlett said that at a later date, university officials will go through a proposal process that will involve a detailed comparison process between the current vendor and the new vendors that decide to apply for the contract.
He explained that university officials chose to try out the new system at this time along with the scheduled Send Word Now test so that comparisons would be accurate.
"We wanted to do the tests with the same population of people at the same time," Bartlett said. "We wanted to create the same conditions so it was an apples−to−apples comparison."
Regardless of which system Tufts ends up using, Bartlett emphasized that once a message is sent, recipients should be sure to read the message and spread the message through word−of−mouth.
"For a variety of reasons, you cannot assume everyone got word," he said. "We want to emphasize that word−of−mouth is a huge part of [the emergency alert] working."
